Slowburn - Problem Solving

Matt Cornell's Problem solving support page.
[no this page will not solve all your problems, find a good shrink and a good mechanic]

With Windows

First things first - your problem is windows. It's great that microsoft has made huge contributions in the standardization (which rhymes with bastardization) of many diverse aspects of computing:

How much pressure to exert on a retail store to sell only your products or none at all - a big crazy bunch .
Like where corporate America should donate all their resources - Microsoft.
And how much information a company is entitled to find out about you if you choose to use their operating system - Every bit.
What keys to press when your operating system fails - CTRL-ALT-DEL
like who's to blame for making a mail client that can cripple large parts of the internet with it's flagrant security flaws - Outlook

That's enough of a precursor. I'll break this section down into software and hardware. These are just very rudimentary suggestions. You are invited to believe that I would do something entirely more sophisticated in my approach to solving a problem.

Software

First Step

First thing to do with all problems, anomolies, or annoyances concerning windows, Reboot. I would have put the word Reboot in much bigger letters for empahsis if my better judgement of taste allowed me.

Second Step

If you're using Windows 2000 or WinXp, use your Task Manager to check out what processes are running.

Third Step

If you recently installed some software just before the problem started, uninstall by using the icon in it's start menu folder called Uninstall. If it's not there (shame on that company's software distribution policy) and go to the Control Panel and select Add/Remove Software. Find the bad boy and click on remove.

Hardware

Most all first level problems are caused by the need for a very confusing order of operations that I've never heard anyone quantify very well. What does this mean for you the user? It means that you need to uninstall, and reinstall.

Go to the Control Panel and select the System Manager click on Hardware tab, and Device Manager. From there, find the device in question and uninstall it. Shut your computer off.

Restart.

My Internet [back to top]

First off, it is not your internet any more then it's Al Gore's super information highway. Your connection to the internet must be working in order for you to see the internet.

Get to your command prompt.

Then, there are a couple of commands you can type in that will give you some diagnostic information.

First and foremost, you can use ping. Take a big website and ping it from the command line. [ How do I use Ping? ]

ping www.google.com

If you see a
Reply from 216.239.57.99: bytes=32 time=80ms TTL=46

Then your internet is working good. Something else is wrong.

My Email [back to top]

find out what your email server's name is, and ping it from the command line.